


Treasures Untold

by TheAlchemistsDaughter



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Babies, Ben has tentacles but is very sweet really, Eggs, F/M, MerMay, Rating May Change, Rey is a mermaid, Reylo babies, TentaKylo, Tentacles, babies from eggs, mermaid au, tentacle business in the hoo-ha for sure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:27:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23949868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAlchemistsDaughter/pseuds/TheAlchemistsDaughter
Summary: Rey is a mermaid determined to find her family. She seeks out Snoke, the Sea Witch, but finds his apprentice, Kylo Ren instead. He tells her all magic has a price, but Rey wants to pay it. To prevent her from going to Snoke, he agrees to perform the spell himself, binding her to him until the debt is paid. He doesn't expect to get more than he bargained for.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 72
Kudos: 375
Collections: F@$k Cancer in the Ass (For a Good Cause)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> IT'S MERMAY, BITCHES!!!!

Everyone knew about the sea witch. He had killed the prince, after all. Beyond that, it was impossible to know what was true and what was just a rumour. People said his name was Snoke. People said that he was giant, that he had a nest of tentacles instead of a single tail like they did, and that he was gold in colour. Some people even whispered that he had taken the prince as payment, because all his magic had a price, in exchange for everything the Queen and her brother had now.

Rey didn’t believe that. Leia wouldn’t do that.

Some people said Snoke was dead, or that he had never existed, just a monster used to scare children. Rey hoped that wasn’t true, because she was packing a bag and going to find him.

She was going to ask him to tell her about her parents, help her find them if they were still alive. She was tired of being alone, always alone.

The community of merfolk that populated the reef had done their best, but where other children had had homes to go to, Rey’d had a series of hollows, finding a new one when she outgrew the old one. People were nice to her, polite, but she had no connections to any of them. They had their own lives, and Rey wasn’t part of them.

She hadn’t told anyone she was going. Only Finn or Rose would care, and they would try to stop her.

She slung her pack onto her shoulders and set off. It helped that she lived on an outcropping at the edge of the reef. She didn’t have to pass anyone on her way. No one would notice she was missing, as long as she returned within a few days. She didn’t know where or how to find Snoke, but she imagined it wouldn’t be hard. Everyone knew he lived in The Dark, where the water was so deep the sunlight didn’t penetrate.

Rey turned away from the reef, the shore behind it, and swam out to sea. The water around her turned from clear turquoise to a deeper blue, deeper and deeper until it was almost navy, currents sucking and tugging at her. She stayed close to the ocean floor, shivering in the fresh cold. She knew she couldn’t get lost like this. She often swam out far to hunt or scavenge the humans’ sunken ships, but with the weight of the water bearing down on her, she felt more alone than ever. She pushed on.

Eventually she reached the limit of Leia’s small kingdom, the place that all merfolk were forbidden to go, the trench cut into the sea floor that was pure black, a chasm separating what was safe and what was not, home and open waters. Rey took a deep breath and reached into her bag for her light.

If she wanted to find her parents, if she wanted a family to finally belong to, she had to go down deeper, into the dark.

With a flick of her tail, she pushed off from the sand and swam down into the cold. She paused every few moments, trying to see, keeping her hands on the wall of the chasm to ground her. She didn’t know how long she swam. Her lamp was the only light, and it didn’t reach far, only illuminating her face.

The canyon widened further down, and eventually Rey saw a sandy floor. She paused, looking around. The pressure down here made her ears tight and it was harder to exhale, while every inhale rushed in like it would drown her. There was nothing to indicate which way she should go. She could easily lose her way home if she travelled too far. There were fish down here though, she was heartened to see. Things did live down here after all. She held out a hand to let a school of silvery fish dance between her fingers, too small to eat, all bone.

A wake rippled her hair as something big rushed overhead. She looked up in alarm, but she couldn’t see. Something wrapped around the end of her tail, just above her fin, and pulled, reeling her in to she knew not what. Rey cried out and fumbled for her knife. Another limb wrapped around her waist.

“Are you crazy? Put out that light!” hissed a male voice, sounding too normal to be found here.

She stopped fighting for a moment. _Things_ were touching her everywhere, like thin tails, brushing against her skin and wrapping around her wrists. Her light was snatched out of her hand and she watched it sail further down the canyon. Her hand that held the knife was enveloped in flesh only slightly warmer than the water around it.

“Who-? What-?” She writhed in the muscular bonds that tied her, rolling onto her back to look down her body. The tentacles led back to a gap in the rock, in which a merman was trying to hide himself. His torso was white as a shark’s belly, almost glowing in the colourless surroundings. When she found him in the dark, the tentacles flinched, then all but the one around her tail slid off her. She couldn’t swim away, able only to lie on the sand, but she didn’t try to escape.

He had tentacles, like people said the sea witch had. His were black, not gold, invisible in the dark and making his pale body look severed and adrift. Black hair floated around his face in the weak currents of the canyon like an angry shadow. His hands were pressed palms flat against the rock. He looked caught off-guard as she searched out his black eyes.

His tentacles must be very long, longer than her tail, to have wrapped around her the way they had at that distance, but then his top half was big too, broad-chested and sturdy.

“Are you Snoke?” Rey asked. Had she found him?

The stranger frowned.

“Who are you?”

“I’m looking for the sea witch,” Rey insisted, keeping her voice strong.

“You have not found him,” he replied, but he did not release her tail.

She tugged on it, not hard, not impolitely, just as a reminder if he had forgotten he still had one tar-black tentacle banding her white and brown tail. “Then let me go so I can keep looking.”

He frowned harder and then she was being pulled towards him, until he towered over her and tentacles bunched around her like a bed of kelp. They allowed him to hold himself high and still in a way no merman could, and Rey found it eerie and unnerving. “What do you want with him?”

Rey tipped her chin stubbornly. “I need his magic.”

“Magic has a cost.”

“I know that. I can pay.”

“Can you?” he challenged, clearly thinking she couldn’t. He leant over her, looking down her body and at her bag as if for the treasure she would use to buy her magic. “You don’t know what you’re asking. He doesn’t want what you are willing to give. The price will be high.”

“I don’t care.”

He considered her again. “What’s your name?”

Rey swallowed. She didn’t know exactly how magic worked, so she didn’t want to give anything away for free. “If I tell you, will you use it against me?”

To her surprise, he smiled at that, and seemed to relax, sinking lower as if he was sitting somehow. The tentacles framing her loosened, some of their coils settling against her scales. “No.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t. You can’t.” He shrugged as if it was immutable fact.

“Are you a sea witch? I heard Snoke has tentacles like yours.”

The touch of them whisked away like a broken wave, even the one around her tail slithering off. Rey wondered if she shouldn’t have mentioned it, but why? She couldn’t see why he would be sensitive about them.

“These were my price. I used to have a tail like you. Snoke took my tail and gave me these so I could never return to the light. That is why you shouldn’t look for him. The cost will be more than you can bear.” He was frowning again.

Rey looked at him, trying to see into the balled up mass of his coils. How would she feel if she had tentacles instead of a tail? Different, but they looked like they worked well enough. She would survive. “Did he give you what you asked for?”

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

“Power.” The pronouncement fell between them like a stone. Rey didn’t know what to say. He didn’t seem to have any power, down here in the dark, and yet he felt far from powerless to her. He sensed her loss for words and filled her silence. “Power I cannot use, because I am trapped here. You see? That is how Snoke works. He will give you what you want, and you will regret it for the rest of your life. Don’t go to him.”

Rey considered his warning, then shook her head. No price was too high. “I have to.”

“Why? What do you want from him?”

“I want to know who my parents are, and what happened to them, and why they left me alone,” Rey said, trying to communicate to him the depth of the hole that needed to be filled in her.

He studied her for a moment before reluctantly admitting, “I can do that, some of it at least.”

“What?”

“That power I asked for? Snoke gave me magic and made me his apprentice.”

Rey gasped, bounding up and closer to him. “Why didn’t you tell me? Can you do it now? What do you want for it?” She reached for her bag and opened it, reaching in to show him the best of what she had salvaged from the ships.

Tentacles wrapped lightly around her wrists, pulling them apart so that her hand left the bag. “Do not be so eager to surrender what you have.”

“But-!”

“For now, if you want me to do this, and it will stop you going to Snoke, come home with me.” He flexed his tentacles and rose through the water, ready to move. “My name is Kylo Ren,” he offered her over his shoulder.

“I’m Rey,” she returned with a smile.

“Rey. Follow me.” He bunched his tentacles beneath him, then propelled himself forward like an octopus. It was not a graceful way of swimming, Rey thought, but that was nothing when he was going to help her find her parents. With a grin, she shouldered her pack and swam after him, careful not to lose sight of him in the dark. Watching him move, she studied his tentacles that threaded out from black flesh at his waist like strings off a skirt. They really were long, maybe longer than she was, and there were a lot of them. At their centre, under the skirt they belonged to, his skin was grey. She wondered if he knew that, then stopped looking as it felt rude.

Kylo led her to a ledge in the cliff-face that marked a cave. He checked over his shoulder that she was following, then disappeared inside. Her tail did not have his dexterity, but the gap was big enough, and she bumped her way in. Inside his home, the walls were dotted with light-giving moss, turning the space silver like the weakest moonlight. It was better than outside, but Rey had seen brighter nights at the reef.

He looked self-conscious as he settled against the wall, his tentacles drifting out to fill the space before he pulled them back in to make room for her, and she let herself sit, her tail out to the side and her weight held on one arm as she looked at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re his apprentice?” she asked.

“Because I wanted to send you home, light-sider,” he groused in return.

“But you have magic.”

“Not as strong as his, and I require a price just the same.”

“What? I’ll give it to you.” She reached for her bag again.

“It won’t be anything in that bag.”

She put it down, a little offended. “You don’t even know what’s in here.”

Three of his tentacles uncurled tentatively over her tail, resting against her like affectionate pets. “It won’t be any material thing.”

That worried her a little. “But you can do it? You can find my parents?”

He sighed heavily. “How much I can find out depends on how much it has been hidden. I will be able to tell you something.”

“And… your price?”

“That depends on how much I find out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I won’t take more than I have to, but the magic requires that it be something I want, not something you can spare. I won’t know the price until I have the knowledge. I will tell you the price, and if you refuse, I won’t tell you what I know.”

Rey didn’t think she could leave, knowing that he knew. “Alright.”

“Rey, I told you Snoke took my tail and made me like him, but that wasn’t all. I can’t ever return to the light, and he took my name. Those were three different spells, because I thought those things didn’t matter as much as the power I would gain. It took me a long time to realise how much I had lost, and how little I had really won. He always promised me more if I gave him more, until I lost everything. You might think now that the magic is worth it, but it never is.”

She could see in his eyes that he meant it as a sincere warning. He was trying to be kind by telling her the truth of it, but he didn’t know what it was to grow up alone and unloved.

“What do you mean he took your name?”

“Snoke gave me the name Kylo Ren. I don’t know who I was before that.”

How sad. Rey wasn’t made of stone. She understood how magic had ruined his life, trapping him here in the dark, but she only wanted one thing, not three. It wouldn’t be as bad for her. “But you won’t do that to me, right?”

“I don’t know what I will do to you but… I don’t want your name. It’s unlikely that that will be your price.”

Rey supposed it was lucky she only had half a name to begin with. It wouldn’t buy her much, so he’d be forced to ask for something else. “How do we do this?”

He sighed, obviously conflicted. He was doing this so she wouldn’t go to Snoke instead, but he didn’t want to. He held out his hands. “Take them.”

Rey hurried forwarded, dislodging his tentacles from her tail in the process, but as she positioned herself in front of him, they swirled around her, blanketing the floor of his cave and surrounding her. She put her hands in his, her fingers barely covering his palm, and he folded his fingers over hers. He closed his eyes and Rey held her breath. She watched his face as a line of concentration appeared between his brows. She didn’t feel anything happening, but seconds later he opened his eyes, looking off to the side and dropping her hands.

“Well?” she prompted him.

“I don’t want to do this,” he objected.

“Tell me!” She lurched up, her hands balling into fists to stop herself from grabbing his big shoulders and shaking him.

He pressed his eyes closed again, his face twisted in guilt. “Two months.”

“What?”

“Two months. You will live here with me for two months, then I will tell you. That is your price.”

“But you do know something?”

“Yes. I know more than you do.”

“…Do you think it’s a fair trade?”

“No,” he replied immediately. Well, she had expected that.

With a sweep of her arm, she put distance between them, swimming over the tangle of his black tendrils where they had grouped around her. She bit her lip. He knew something.

Two months.

But he knew the truth.

It was only two months.

“Will I be okay here? I won’t starve or anything? You won’t feed me to a shark, or make me your slave?”

Again, he smiled. He seemed to like it when she didn’t trust him. “I can hunt for us both. You should be safe here, no more at risk of being eaten by a shark than in the light. I won’t make you work, but if Snoke finds you, I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“You don’t know?”

“He might want to prey on you himself. He might be angry that I didn’t tell him, or he might be pleased that I’m finally acting like him.” Kylo sneered in disgust, and Rey didn’t know if it was directed at Snoke or at himself.

“But you won’t be cruel to me?”

Kylo let his head fall back against the cave wall, his eyes closing in despair. “No, I won’t be cruel to you.”

It was only time. Two months of her life. It was nothing really, not when at the end of it, she would finally know the truth about herself, about her family. She might be able to meet them. She might be able to be part of a real family.

“Alright, Kylo.”

He was already shaking his head. “Don’t say that.”

“I want to do it.”

“No.”

“We have a deal.”

He groaned, long and low. His head tipped forward until his chin rested on his chest and his hair drifted down around his face. Long seconds passed, then he bit out through gritted teeth, “Deal.”

Rey didn’t feel anything change, but his tentacles reached for her again, moving across the floor like eels as if, if they stayed low, they wouldn’t be seen. When they reached her their tips lifted to flick against the veil of her fin.

“Why are you always touching me?” she blurted out.

The tentacles shrivelled back to him quicker than she would have thought possible. “Is it a problem?” he asked, not looking at her.

“…Is it my price?”

Maybe something in her voice gave away what she was thinking, because he looked up at her suddenly, his eyes wide. Then something shifted, and again a tentacle looped around her tail at the base of her fin, and another around her waist where her scales met her skin. They were heavy and thick, and the bonelessness of them felt strange. The suckers on the inside created a ruffled texture, kissing softly onto her with the barest pressure. Kylo tugged hard, instantly bringing her halfway across the room to him.

“And if it is? It’s too late to back out now, the magic is sealed.” Something had changed in him, as if he was being driven now by something else, a darker voice speaking from his mouth. Rey wasn’t scared yet though. She still had her knife, and he had warned her.

She pushed against the tentacle at her waist. It stretched under her hands, humouring her, but it didn’t release her. The suction cups tightened. 

“I’m not backing out, I’m just asking,” she said, keeping her voice calm.

His face softened and he floated her in close to him, building her a seat of tentacles before she reached him, letting her down onto the nest. “Your price is your company. I own you within this time, but I am not a monster. I’ve never had anything to hold before, other than prey. I find I like it, but that’s all it is. I want to wrap you up. Suffering that is part of your price. If you hate it, if it is more than an inconvenience, the price becomes too high and the magic is imbalanced. I may annoy you, Rey, but I won’t hurt you, not really.” His lips twisted in a wry, self-deprecating smile.

He was hard to dislike or fear when he was like this. “I don’t hate it.”

Several more tentacles worked their way around her. “Good.”

She looked around the room. “Where will I sleep?”

Kylo looked too, apparently noticing for the first time how ill-prepared his home was for guests. “You can have my bed.”

And he was true to his word. After a dinner from Kylo’s stores, Rey grew tired. Night didn’t fall in the Dark, the light in Kylo’s cave stayed the same, a silvery moonlight glow from the moss on his walls, so there was no way to know what time of day it was, but she started to yawn, so Kylo untangled himself from her. With his tentacles so knotted up around her, he had to walk his first steps on his hands before he could use the long black limbs to pull himself along. Leaving her revealed the pile of kelp-stuffed sacking he had been sitting on. He piled himself against the wall, growing taller as he bunched his tentacles underneath himself.

“It’s not much, but it’s better than the floor,” he said.

“Will you be alright there though?” Rey asked. She hadn’t expected her price to include stealing his bed.

“I’ll be fine,” Kylo promised, waving her off. “I’ve more than enough of these to cushion me.”

Rey couldn’t really argue with that. As she lay down to sleep, she asked him again, “Do you really know where my parents are?”

“I know something,” he half-answered.

“Am I going to happy to hear it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Rey would be happy to hear anything about them. “Goodnight, Kylo.”

“Goodnight, Rey.”

She lay on the bed he had clearly made himself, the softest thing in the stone cave, and went to sleep. Later, she woke when something brushed her face. Lifting her head, she saw Kylo was still asleep, one tentacle under his head for a pillow, and two winding over his back to keep him warm. The other five had relaxed in his sleep and spread across the floor, covering every inch, one of them making it to her face. Rey put her hand down on the tip of the wandering tentacle to stop it tickling her again, and laid her head down. She watched as the reaching tentacles all turned towards her like a faithful congregation, presumably wondering at the touch at the end of their brother. She went back to sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

When Rey woke up, she had no idea what time it was inside Kylo’s dark cave. She blinked, and realised that it wasn’t his bed she could feel cushioning her. She could see that across the room, empty. She looked down at her body, and the black tentacles that had found her in the night and reeled her in, half-way across the small cave. They seemed relaxed, but the suckers sat snug against her skin.

As she watched, a small pulse travelled through them like a breath, and they curled, passing her another few suckers down, moving her an inch or two closer to his body.

She looked over her shoulder at him, finding him still sleeping, his pale body still as stone. His breathing stirred the tips of his long hair where it lay across his cheek. With his cheek against a tentacle for a pillow, his nose looked bigger, and his lips fuller, pushed into the black limb and parted slightly.

Rey wondered who he was. She wondered if he wanted to find his parents too, and go home. She wondered if he couldn’t use his magic for himself, or if he was simply afraid to, not wanting to pay another price.

She needed to get out of his tentacles before she found herself pressed up against him. She used her hands to pull herself along the cave floor, flicking her tail as much as she was able, but the movement seemed to trigger the tentacles, and suddenly they tightened and coiled around her, rock hard, and she gasped as she was dragged back in a second. She hit Kylo’s chest with a dull thump, and his arm caught her around the waist. She looked up to see him blinking down at her dozily.

“O-Oh, sorry, I- Your tentacles just grabbed me and…”

He looked down her body as if he wasn’t quite awake yet. “Oh. Sorry,” he mumbled. Slowly, his tentacles unwound, and she fell away from him. She swam quickly to the cave wall, and he rolled onto his back and pushed his hand through his hair with a yawn.

“They’re pretty strong,” she said. She didn’t know if she should be impressed or afraid.

“Mmm.”

She kept her eyes on one that was making its way covertly back to her. “What do the suckers do?”

“Suck.”

She clicked her tongue. “I know _that_. I mean… are they sensitive? Can you feel anything through them?”

He rolled his head to watch her without getting up. “To a degree. There are a lot, it’s hard to keep track of them all, so if only one or two have something, I can’t tell much about it, but if a lot of them team up, I can feel as well as with my hands.”

The wandering tentacle found the fan of her tail and rippled along it. “Are you doing that on purpose, or do they do things on their own?”

“If I’m not thinking about them, they just spread out to try to catch things, I think, or to keep an eye on my surroundings. But since I’m looking at that one, I’m more aware of it, so yes, I’m doing that on purpose.” He gave her a tentative smile, and she smiled back. She didn’t mind. She’d never met anyone like him before, so she was as curious about his tentacles as they seemed to be about her.

She bent forwards and held out her hand, palm up, as if she expected the tentacle to crawl blindly into it. Kylo smiled again, and simply deposited it in her hand. She closed her fingers around it and brought it closer to her face. It was so squishy. The point thinned to almost nothing, impossibly delicate, so that she could see the individual dots of black pigment at the very tip when she looked closely. She turned it over to look at the suckers, from small to tiny. She ran her finger along them and they twitched, trying to catch her, and she laughed.

“How strong are they?”

Kylo shrugged, moving to sit beside her with a swirl of black limbs. “Unless they wrapped around you, they wouldn’t be able to hold you, but the big ones could bruise your skin.”

“ _Really?_ ”

Kylo lifted his tentacle out of her hand, and she watched as it rose up before her face, curling backwards to spread the suckers. He adjusted it back and forth, carefully selecting a sucker, and Rey giggled as it came to land on just the tip of her nose, latching on gently. She crossed her eyes to look at it.

“Kylo…” She wrapped both hands around the thick body of the tentacle as if she could pull it off, though she didn’t. She felt the sucker pulse softly as it tugged at her, making her laugh. When it began to prickle, the sensation turning sharp, she made a face. “Ow, stop, you’re going to make my nose red.”

The tentacle came away easily and she rubbed her nose. “Is it red?” She asked turning to him, and finding him smiling at her, a surprisingly soft look on his face.

“Yes, it is,” he said then with a wicked smirk.

“Oh!” She slapped his arm, and he disappeared into a knot of tentacles as he used them to propel himself across the room by pushing off the wall, his laugh rich and deeper than hers.

Once he was at a safe distance and she wasn’t chasing him, he asked, “Hungry? Let’s go find breakfast.”

“I can go outside?”

“I’ll show you around.”

“I’d like that.” No one else from the reef had ever explored the Dark, and she had to admit, she was curious. She went to her bag and took out the things she would need, leaving the rest. “What about Snoke?” she asked as he preceded her through the entrance.

“He doesn’t come here. If he wants to see me, he sends a messenger, but if I tell you to hide, hide, and stay close to me.”

Outside the cave, she missed Kylo’s illuminating moss almost immediately. The canyon was almost pitch black. She looked for the white of his body and swam towards it. “I thought I had to stay in the cave?”

“It’s my company that you’re contracted to, not the cave. Sometimes it will be safer for you to stay there by yourself, but once you’ve learned to find your way around, you can come out.”

She looked towards him, hoping to see his face, but he wasn’t looking at her and it was too dark. “Can you really see in this?”

“You get used to it.”

With a flutter of her tail, she caught up to him and grabbed one of his tentacles. It turned heavy in her hand, and Kylo turned to look at her. “I don’t want to get separated,” she mumbled shyly.

“I can’t swim if you hold on like that. Take my hand.”

She saw it extending towards her in the dark, just a silvery silhouette, and she gladly took it. His hand was big and firm around hers.

“Can you keep up with me?” he asked teasingly, and she squeaked, insulted.

“I’m one of the fastest swimmers at the reef, thank you very much!” He might have more limbs than she did, and they might be longer than her tail, but she had fins to guide her, and her tail was thicker.

He chuckled at her response. “Alright then. Follow me.”

Teasing aside, it took a moment for them to find a rhythm. He moved in bursts, throwing himself forward with his many tentacles, whereas she swam more evenly. Eventually, he settled on many quick, small pulses to stay beside her, which must have felt awkward to him, but he didn’t say anything.

“So, Rey, tell me about yourself.”

He sounded like he was just making idle conversation, but Rey was wary for a moment. She didn’t know what it would mean to tell him anything about herself, but then she supposed their deal was already sealed, and he hadn’t wanted to take the price she had to pay in the first place, so he probably wouldn’t use the information against her.

She shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. My parents left the reef when I was little, leaving me behind. I don’t remember why, if they told me. I survived by scavenging, and trading salvage from sunken ships.”

He hummed in acknowledgment.

“What about you?”

“Oh, me? I told you, I don’t remember much from before I met Snoke. I know I was a merman who lived at the reef, like you, but I’ve lost my name so anything that could help me remember that is gone too. My memories are just disconnected flashes, images. I don’t have any context for it.”

“Do you think your parents are looking for you?”

He slowed so suddenly Rey overshot him so much she almost pulled her hand out of his. “I hope not,” he said, his voice so hollow Rey instantly regretted her thoughtless words. She liked to think that all parents and children would be reunited one day, that families thought about the ones they missed when they were apart. For her, it was a happy thought. She supposed for the one who had chosen to leave the others behind, it might not be.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking…” She didn’t know how to make it okay. She just held onto his hand. If he didn’t let go, she wouldn’t either. It was ironic, their situations were so similar, but she had no idea what to say. She was trying to find her parents, no matter the cost, but he had chosen to forget his. It was hard for her to relate to that. Would he feel better if she told him his parents probably missed him every day, or if she told him they’d forgotten him too?

“It’s alright,” he said, but his voice had lost its levity.

“Maybe you’ll get them back one day,” she tried.

“No.”

“But-”

“They wouldn’t want me back, not like this. They’re merfolk, and I’m… a monster.”

“I don’t think you’re a monster.”

“Because I have something you want, something you can use.”

“You’re giving me my parents back, and you’d be giving them their son back. I’m sure they’d be so happy to see you, they wouldn’t care that you don’t have a tail anymore.”

There was a long pause, and Rey wished she could see better. Her eyes were adjusting enough that she could pick out his body, but his hair and tentacles were invisible, and obscured anything behind them, cutting him into headless, faceless shapes.

“Maybe,” he said. The water rushed around her as he pushed ahead of her, her arm jerking as she was tugged after him. “The hunting grounds are just around this bend.”

She kept her mouth shut after that.

Rey was a good hunter, usually. In the Dark, she was basically useless, and it annoyed her. Kylo reassured her that it wouldn’t affect their spell, but she hated to feel like she wasn’t pulling her weight, maybe just because she wasn’t used to a meal she hadn’t had to work for. Kylo positioned her with her back against the canyon wall so she wouldn’t get lost, and left her there with nothing to do but sit and stare into the darkness.

“I’ll catch, you kill, how about that?” he’d said, so she kept her knife ready in her hand.

She had no idea how much time had passed before Kylo came back, half a dozen fish stuck thrashing to his tentacles. He made a show of reclining on the sand and picking at his teeth with his nails while Rey ran her hands all over his tentacles to find the fish and dispatch them, handing him his share.

She couldn’t believe he’d caught so many at once. This many could last her a week, if she found plants and things to go with the fish, but she supposed he was bigger than her, and he turned out to be a surprisingly wasteful eater. Rey took her time to work her tongue over the fine bones, gathering every scrap of flesh from the skull to the last fin. Kylo took maybe four bites of each, leaving a lot gathered around the spine and the guts. Watching, Rey thought she could probably subsist on his leavings alone, if she was in a mood to pick up after him.

She didn’t comment on it. They were his catch, he could do what he wanted with them, though it did mean he had to wait a while for her to be finished, and he didn’t move from his position on his back, his tentacles tangled all around her, bunched up against the canyon wall.

“We’ll have to get some kelp, for a second bed,” she said.

He grunted, as if he hadn’t thought of that.

“Are there any sunken ships in the Dark? We could get more sacking.”

His tentacles gathered against her. “The only one I know is Snoke’s lair, so if you ever see one, don’t explore, just turn around and go back the way you came.”

“Is he really that bad?”

“Yes.”

“You make it sound like he’ll eat me or something.”

“He will. He’ll take everything you are, and you won’t realise until it’s too late that you gave it all away for just… bubbles.”

She put her hand out until she found a tentacle, thick and slick. “I don’t think you’re bubbles,” she said, trying to soothe him.

He laughed, and then the tentacle wound itself up her arm, and she was rapidly wrapped head to toe in them, pulled in against who-knew-what part of his body. She thought her lower back and upper tail was pressed up against the underside of his skirt, the centre of his tentacles. There was so much of him, the tentacles’ odd flesh all over her. She didn’t try to resist. She wasn’t scared. Maybe because they had a deal, or because he’d been nice so far, but she trusted him.

“I don’t think you’re bubbles either, my little mermaid,” he said, and she wished she could see better. She wished she could see his face. “But promise me you won’t seek him out.”

She rubbed her hand against the nearest tentacle. “I don’t have to. You’re going to give me what I want, aren’t you?”

Kylo hesitated. “Promise me, anyway.” His tentacles squeezed, not like he was threatening her, more like he couldn’t help it. “Promise me, Rey.”

“Alright, I promise.”

“Good.”

She waited for him to let her go, but it was slow coming. She had to wrestle her own way free after his tentacles loosened enough for her to slip through.

“Should we look for kelp now?”

“I’ll catch some lobsters for dinner first.” He put the fish skeletons in a bag. “We can use these to catch something bigger. Are you okay to stay here? I know it’s boring.”

“No, it’s okay. I can be patient.” She offered him a small smile.

“Okay. Just stay as still as you can. I use my suckers to sense movement in the sand.”

With a flurry of water, he was gone, leaving her with the bag. Rey sighed and lay down to be as still as possible. There wasn’t any current down here, nothing to even stir her fins, and when she looked up, she couldn’t see any light at all. Two months… She wondered if she’d be as pale as Kylo when she went back to the reef.

“Ow!” she heard Kylo yell, followed by a lot of cursing, and the snap of pincers and the eventual crack of carapace. “He got me,” he explained, abashed, tossing the dead lobster her way so she could put it in their bag.

“Are you alright? Does it hurt?”

“It hurts but… I’ll be fine. I’ve still got seven left over.”

She giggled. Maybe later she could put some of her sea snail slime on his wound to help it heal.


	3. Chapter 3

And that was how their days passed. Every day they went out to hunt and forage for what they needed, until Rey could make it to the hunting grounds by herself, not that she ever had to. Kylo taught her about the Dark, about where was safe and where wasn’t, and what kind of creatures lived there, pointing out the different landmarks. It was clear that, while it might not be what he wanted, Kylo didn’t hate the Dark. He found wonder and beauty in it the same as she did. It was different from the reef, but it wasn’t evil, and nor was Kylo.

His tentacles still tangled around her at every opportunity, until she stopped noticing when one or two looped around her tail or her wrist. It was as if he just had really long hair. He couldn’t keep them from touching her any more than he could control errant locks stirred by a wake.

She found him to be exceptionally good company. Rey had never had a friend before. At the reef, there was Rose and Finn, merfolk her age who were kind to her when they saw her, but they lived at the reef proper while she lived alone under a small rock shelf in deeper waters. They didn’t seek her out, and Rey didn’t have time to just hang out. She only went to the reef to trade her salvage, and then she had to go back out again to make the most of the day.

But Kylo was always by her side, talking to her, asking questions about her, showing her things he had found as if her opinion mattered, as if she might enjoy sharing his experiences, and she did the same with him. He never acted as if she was strange, even when she spent the evening braiding his hair or asking him endless questions about his tentacles, trying to count the suckers. He let her ask about his magic, and didn’t hold anything back from her. Only when she talked about her parents, or their spell, did he get quiet and start offering only half-answers.

After a couple of nights of Rey being dragged across the cave floor in their sleep by his greedy tentacles, they agreed to push their pallets together and simply start the night beside each other. Rey thought she would struggle more, sleeping next to another person, but Kylo’s tentacles made it impossible to be awkward or stiff when they spilled over her on their way out across the floor, or tickled her nose curiously. Kylo was a still, and quiet sleeper in contrast, all his activity happening exclusively below the waist. He said he didn’t have enough memories left to dream.

An unexpected problem presented itself one morning when Rey rolled over and her belly brushed his, his hand falling naturally on top as if he was protecting himself.

“Why is your stomach so hard?” he mumbled, barely awake. “I know I’m feeding you well, so shouldn’t it be soft?”

Rey didn’t bother opening her eyes. There was still more sleep to be had. “Those are eggs, silly.”

Somehow, she felt him open his eyes, coming fully awake. “Eggs?”

The energy was all wrong now. She couldn’t sleep if he was getting up, so she begrudgingly opened her eyes. “Yes, eggs. It’s spring.” Surely he must know how a mermaid’s body worked? He’d been a merman once, and lived at the reef. But perhaps it was so dark down here, he’d lost track of the seasons.

He pushed himself up, swimming away from her as if he meant to start his day, though there was hardly anywhere for him to go in the small cave. “I- I didn’t realise. How long do you have until you…?”

“Lay?” Rey put a hand to her swelling stomach, rubbing idly as she did the calculations in her head. She’d never expected to have to stay in the Dark when she’d set out, so her breeding cycle hadn’t factored into her plans. “A few weeks.”

“Will… Will you still be here? Do you think? When you…?”

Rey smiled, watching Kylo the sea witch get flustered and pretend to be busy with something else, fiddling with a strip of rope, as he asked her whether she would be laying eggs in his cave. She made a pillow of her forearm as she lay on her back. She was quite comfortable, even if he was not. “How much longer do I have left?”

Kylo looked at her, his dark eyes round as his black hair swirled. “You don’t know? You haven’t been counting?”

“I lost count. I trust you to tell me.”

“You do?” He worked the string around his finger.

“Mm-hmm. I figured your magic would tell you.”

He looked away again. “That’s right. Well, you have five weeks and four days left.”

Rey thought about it. “Then I think I will have to lay them here. Is that alright?” Maybe he didn’t want her messing his home up with a nest. She rushed to reassure him. “I never keep them! I won’t need a nest or anything, I can just bury them outside.”

He floated towards her, concern twisting his face. “What do you mean, you don’t keep them?”

“Well, I-” She was surprised how much this part hurt to tell him. “I don’t have a mate and no one ever wants to fertilise my eggs so I just…”

He drifted closer then sunk down beside her, his tentacles rising and fluttering like a cloud of disturbed sand, before landing across her tail and settling around her. He put his hand on her stomach, his brows furrowed. “Why doesn’t anyone want to fertilise them?”

Rey blew out a breath. It wasn’t something she’d ever had to explain before. Everyone at the reef had just known. She was an outsider, an outcast. She lived alone on the fringes, known to them but not part of them. When breeding season came, everyone paired up with people they knew better than her.

The first year her eggs had come, she hadn’t known what was happening. All she’d known was her belly had swollen slowly over the course of weeks and, stupidly, she’d thought she was getting fat, and delighted in what an accomplished hunter she must be. She’d been away from the reef when she’d started laying, pains in her belly curling her on the sand, until the first eggs had started to slip from her and she’d realised the truth. She had tried to make it to the reef for help, fragile eggs in her arms and more dropping from her, struggling to carry them all, but by the time she had got there, their shells had hardened white and no more came, so she just left them under some seaweed.

The second year, when her belly had started to harden again, she had watched what the other mermaids did carefully. They went with their friends to a flat rock shelf, and built nests, decorating them and talking happily of their mates and what males might fertilise their eggs that year and who they hoped for. Rey had tried to do the same, building an uncertain ring of stones and kelp and sand, adding shells and shiny things without knowing why, only knowing the other mermaids had done it. She’d wanted to do well by the children she might have, give them the best start possible. She’d gotten ready for a family because, while it might have just been the season affecting her thinking, she had wanted the eggs to be fertilised. No mermaid wanted to carry a clutch only to have them mean nothing, like Rey meant nothing.

It hadn’t occurred to her no one would want to fertilise them.

So she had built her nest, once again pushed to the edge of the others after all the good, safe spots were taken, but she felt she was doing everything right. She copied the mermaids’ every move. But then the day before laying day, she had returned to her nest to find it swept off the shelf. She had never known who had done it, or if it had in fact been an accident, a fish or a wake or just a clumsy tail, but that year Rey laid her eggs in the sand by herself and covered them up and pretended they had never happened.

She never tried to build another nest on the ridge, but she kept her ears open. She listened to who was mating with who, which of the mermen would visit which mermaid’s nest. She watched, hidden away, on laying day, as the mermaids laid their eggs while the mermen waited as if behind an invisible barrier. As the mermaids moved off their nests, bellies empty, some of the mermen darted in fast, elbowing each other out of the way and tussling to get to be the one to fertilise the nest of the most desirable mermaid. Rey watched as mates swam confident and assured up to their beloveds, offering a kiss before bowing down over the eggs. And behind them, the free males who drifted with a critical eye past nests and hopeful mermaids alike, looking for one that met their standards.

The window was brief, only minutes, and the process was short. Rey knew she couldn’t possibly bear it, building another nest and laying her eggs and having everything go right, only to watch every male at the reef turn up their nose at her while her eggs turned white and hard in front of her helpless, mortified eyes. No, if she was ever going to do it again, she would need a mate, or at least an agreement with a male beforehand, a promise. And Rey being Rey, it didn’t happen, so every year she picked a pretty spot in the sand far away from the reef where no one would see, or judge her, and built a nest the way she liked where no one would disturb it, to bury her eggs in on laying day, knowing full well a barracuda or some other predator would root them out before a day had passed. She stayed away from those spots afterwards.

She tried not to enjoy Kylo’s hand on her stomach too much now. He’d asked why no one wanted to fertilise her eggs, and she realised everything that had seemed so obvious to her was actually hard to put into words. There wasn’t an easy answer. She just wasn’t one of them.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He lifted his eyes cautiously from her belly to her face. “Do you want someone to fertilise them?”

She stared back at him, at his plush red lips and his beautiful soft hair drifting in a cloud, and his deep, dark, half-hopeful eyes and it felt like a hand extended to her when she was lost for the first time in a very long time. She didn’t have to think about it. “Yes.”

She watched him swallow, his mouth working nervously, and when he spoke again it was in a whisper. “I could.”

She pushed herself up, not wanting to have this conversation lying down, but he flinched away from her, removing his hand from her skin. “I’m sorry, forget I mentioned it.”

“No, Kylo-”

“I know I’m not a merman anymore, you probably don’t want- Of _course_ you don’t want-”

She grabbed his hand, putting it back on her stomach, shutting him up. He turned to look at her again, nervous, hopeful, awed. “Do you think you can?”

He looked affronted. “I- It may not be in the same place, but I still have a- I mean, I can still-” He pressed his lips together and nodded.

Rey grinned, suddenly feeling like this could work. For the first time, her eggs might actually get fertilised and not have to be buried in the sand to be eaten by scavengers because nobody wanted her. “I didn’t mean that I didn’t think you had… what it takes. I just meant that maybe we’re not compatible? Maybe it won’t work?” She kept his hand pressed against her so he couldn’t run away.

She could tell when he started to puzzle out the magic of it, and forget the offence to his manhood. “I was a merman once. These tentacles are just a curse. It’s not like I’m a different species.”

“Okay then,” Rey said, unable to contain it.

“O-Okay?”

“Yes. I want that. I want you to fertilise my eggs. If you want that.”

His thumb rubbed back and forth on her swollen skin, and he nodded again. “I would like that very much,” he said softly.

“I’ll need to build a nest!” she said, quickly swimming a few flips she was so excited. The thought of a nest still sent a flutter of nerves through her chest, but she ignored it. This time would be different.

“I have a bowl…” Kylo offered.

She turned to him sharply. “I am not laying my eggs in a bowl.”

“No, of course not, how foolish of me.” He ducked his head.

“We’ll need to go out get supplies! I’ll need rocks and seaweed and kelp and sand and shells and-” She did another flip. When she came around again, she saw him smiling shyly. This was all his doing. She rushed him, grabbing him in a hug, feeling where his stomach pushed her eggs into her organs. “Thank you,” she whispered in his ear, her arms around his neck.

Kylo’s hands were trembling when they pressed stiffly to her back. “My pleasure.”


	4. Chapter 4

As Rey’s stomach swelled, some things changed, and some didn’t. She wasn’t as agile as she used to be, perhaps, but she was still a strong swimmer. Any hindrance to her swimming came mostly from Kylo, who couldn’t keep his tentacles off her. She had to get used to having two or three on her at all times. He behaved as if she was injured, always trying to support her, swooping in at the first wobble, and constantly trying to feed her. Rey didn’t need to eat more. She made a clutch every year without any extra food, and without anyone floating about to take care of her, which she kept reminding him of, but… The truth was, no one had ever treated her this way before, so she wouldn’t push him away if it was what he wanted. She liked to recline against him in the evenings, his tentacles cushioning her tail, her back against his chest, and his hands cupping her stomach. She felt precious to someone for the first time.

She built her nest in the middle of the cave. They both needed space to be able to lie on top of it, and the cave was not that big. They just had to be careful not to disturb it when swimming over it. She built it out of a circle of stones that she filled in with sand, creating a dip in the middle so it was higher at the walls, which she lined thickly with seaweed, held down by shells she thought were pretty. Kylo never got tired of watching her fiddle with it, lying on his side with his head propped on his fist and a soft look on his face.

It was still foreign to her, the idea that someone might actually _look_ _forward_ to doing this with her. She’d been able to imagine, in the past, that a merman might accept her as his last resort, but not that someone would fuss over her, protective and possessive, and watch her build her nest in utter contentment. Kylo just looked so _sated_ , as if she was doing everything right. Only the faint edge of restlessness gave away that he hadn’t done his part yet.

“What?” she prompted him one night as she fiddled again with the arrangement of the shells, making sure no sharp edges faced into the nest.

“It’s perfect. You’re so good at this,” he said, musing as if to himself.

Rey tucked her chin to her chest, flattered and embarrassed. “It’s nothing. All the mermaids at the reef make their nests like this. I could make it prettier if I had access to the wrecks, or my collection at home.”

Kylo hummed. “I’m sorry you’re stuck here with me, if you’d rather be there.”

Rey shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. I’m glad I’m here, with you.”

He reached out for her hand, not taking it, but resting his fingertips on the back of it. “You are?”

“Sure. Like I said, nobody back home ever wants to do this with me. If I wasn’t here, these eggs would just…”

He closed his hand around her wrist and pulled her over to him, rolling onto his back so that she floated down onto his chest. “I’m glad you’re here too.”

She smiled. “I know you are, or it wouldn’t have been your price, right?”

His easy, dreamy look shuttered, and he let go of her hand. “Right.”

She realised she’d messed up. “Hey, I meant it when I said I’m glad I’m here. You’re going to tell me where my parents are, but more than that, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

He rolled out from under her. She’d been doing so well about not mentioning her parents and the magic between them. He felt so guilty about the spell, she knew. But he really didn’t have to. Two months of her time was a small price to pay for seeing her parents again.

He swam to the mouth of the cave. “I’m going to… find you more shells.”

“I have enough,” she protested.

“Something shiny then.”

“Kylo!”

He was gone in a flurry of tentacles, and she sighed. They only had three weeks left before the spell was complete. She wanted to talk about what would happen afterwards, but he always closed down when she brought it up at all. She was literally on the cusp of laying eggs in his home, in the Dark, not on the reef, so she assumed he was okay with her sticking around in the long term, but she’d want to go find her parents too. She wouldn’t leave him to raise any babies by himself, that was crazy. She wouldn’t leave her children behind the way she’d been left behind, but it would take the eggs months to hatch. Maybe she would have time to go and come back before they did, depending on where her parents were, but that felt odd, wrong. Ideally, she’d like him to go with her to find them, so she wouldn’t have to be alone, but the eggs complicated things, and he’d say he couldn’t go into the light. Maybe the deep open ocean might be okay? She didn’t want it to come down to a choice between her parents and her babies. What if she went, thinking she’d come back, and then something happened to her and her children grew up without a mother, just like she had? She couldn’t bear the thought of not being with them.

With that in mind, Rey sighed and went back to tending her nest.

Kylo came back late, but she’d already gone to bed. He settled in behind her, his tentacles tucking themselves in all around her, patting her more than usual as if assuring themselves she was alright. He put his arm around her and opened his fist where she could see it, a shiny piece of metal sitting in his palm.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Rey accepted it, taking it out of his hand to look at more closely. As salvage went, it wasn’t much, but… “It’s beautiful, thank you.”

He lay his head down behind her, and they went to sleep.

When the day came for her to lay, she woke with a pressure in her belly that slowly grew to a pain, and they both stayed in the cave, eating some saved lobsters and clams. Kylo watched her nervously, and she felt bad for making him wait, but it wasn’t something she could hurry along. She just had to lie on the bed, her hands kneading her stomach, curling up with the pain.

Eventually, there was a sudden urgency, and she felt the first egg drop against her slit from the inside, pushed by the weight of the others behind it. She rolled onto her hands with a groan, half-walking, flapping her tail limply to get her to the nest.

“Now?” Kylo asked from where he’d been floating by the door, trying to give her space.

Rey nodded as she held herself above the nest and stopped holding the eggs in. The first popped out of her instantly, then she tightened her stomach and slowly pushed the rest out. The eggs were soft and translucent, a little bigger than her fists stacked on top of each other.

Kylo swam over, obviously unsure if he was allowed. “Can I look?” he asked shyly, biting his plush, pink lip.

Rey nodded again. It was intimate, but these eggs could become his children too. She tried to make a gap between her chest and the lip of the nest, and Kylo ducked down to peer in. She pushed an egg out knowing he was watching, letting him see.

“Oh,” he whispered, awed, and his hand stroked her arm as his tentacles tickled down her sides.

Rey knew she should let him on top of the nest as soon as possible, but it was hard to tell whether all the eggs were out yet. She still had a pain, sharp, but the pressure was gone, and she put her hand to her belly, trying to feel. There was a hardness there but it was small. She didn’t want to risk the other eggs hardening too much to be fertilised by waiting for one that might still be inside, so she moved off, and Kylo swarmed in eagerly, inches behind her. She smiled at him. His eagerness warmed her heart.

She’d had to lay on top of the nest face down, but Kylo sat on it, his tentacles spreading out in every direction. Clearly his phallus was under his skirt. He met her eyes with a glance, his cheeks pinking, his tentacles twisting and curling in on themselves.

“Um… I don’t think I can do it with you watching.”

“Oh! Really? Alright.” None of the mermen at the reef had had a problem, but Rey obligingly turned, facing the cave wall. She didn’t want to cause a delay. The eggs were only permeable for a few minutes after they left her body. She poked at her belly, the pain still there. She knew what it was. An egg was stuck. It would come out eventually, but it wouldn’t be viable. Rey made a face of regret, but she’d laid plenty of eggs, so one didn’t matter.

She didn’t watch Kylo, but she listened. All was quiet, then he grunted faintly, barely more than a held breath being released. After a minute or two he mumbled, “You can turn around now.”

Rey turned and swam over. It was nice to not be all bloated anymore. Her slit would gape for a while more, and she could feel the sea water cold against her insides, but it wasn’t unpleasant. She was familiar with the sensation, and she almost found it pleasant. She kept her hand on her belly for the pain, and pulled a face at another cramp.

“Can I see?” she asked Kylo, lowering her face just as he had. She wanted to see it too, the fertilising of her eggs, just as he had wanted to see her lay them.

Kylo blushed again but he lifted a tentacle and Rey peered underneath. It was dark, but she could make out the thick white substance that coated her eggs now, lumpy with his seed. She grinned. It was really happening. A male had really chosen her nest at last.

Her belly twinged again as she straightened, and Kylo caught the flash of pain on her face.

“What is it?”

She shook her head. “An egg’s stuck. This always happens. It’ll come out eventually. It doesn’t separate properly.”

His brow folded in concern. “Does it hurt?”

“Only while my body’s trying to push it out.” Rey smiled, trying to brush it off.

He sucked his lips into his mouth for a moment. “Maybe I could… get it out.”

“How?”

He held up the tip of a tentacle awkwardly. Oh. She supposed it was actually thin enough to reach inside her without hurting too much, and the suckers could find the egg and pull it out, but… That was a level of intimacy and trust she’d never even heard of before. He would be reaching inside her body.

Maybe he saw her deliberating, because he added “I’d hate to waste one.”

She considered that. He was right. Not only might he save her hours of pain, but maybe the egg would still be viable if he pulled it out now. Both of their instincts wanted to maximise their potential for hatching a baby, so...

“O-Okay…” She swam a little closer, putting her hands on his shoulders to brace herself so she could keep still for this. The tip of his tentacle brushed against her tail, and she watched it stretch as narrow as he could make it. She flinched when it touched her slit, and then it probed her entrance and crawled inside.

It was so thin that at first her stretched channel barely felt him. She was aware of him moving like a baby eel, bouncing off her walls, then he breached her egg sack with an uncomfortable twinge and she winced. Her body was sending up an alarm that something unnatural was happening, and she squeezed his meaty shoulders to push through it, her fingers digging into his flesh. She felt the tip of his tentacle search, and she felt it disappear from her senses when it landed on the egg.

“There,” she confirmed for him. “I think that’s it.”

The tentacle thickened inside her, and she swallowed a gasp. There was a stab of tearing pain, and then he was withdrawing, the round egg moving through her, being pulled through her shrinking slit with another brief flash of pain that was gone before she could react. A small smear of blood coloured the water and dissolved. Inside her was numb relief.

Kylo held the egg up, his black tentacle cupped around it. The shell was still clear, but she could see veins of blood inside the egg that shouldn’t be there. She lifted a hand to take it, to get rid of it, but Kylo was already pushing it under him into the nest with the others.

“It won’t work, it’s-” she started.

“I want to try,” he replied softly but firmly, and she didn’t argue, sagging as she accepted it. He could try.

Kylo’s skirt above his tentacles was big enough to cover the nest entirely, as if it wasn’t even there, and he made no move to uncover it. It made sense. Better to keep his seed as close to the eggs as possible for as long as they were permeable, and not let the water wash it off. His tentacles wiggled as he balanced on them. He looked… happy, crossing his arms as if proud of a job well done.

Rey darted forward, catching his cheek in one hand to kiss him. It was a moment’s impulse but, well, this made them mates, didn’t it? At least for a while. He made a small noise of surprise, but then his arms pulled out from between them and wrapped around her back instead, pulling her into him. She’d never felt anything like it. His chest was flat and huge against her front, his arms strong, making her feel small and thin, as if he really was a different type of creature entirely. His lips slid against hers, shaping to the kiss, and Rey was suddenly breathless. She dared to push her hand into his hair.

After a moment, his arms loosened and the kiss slowed, and he gave them just enough space to breathe. Rey’s fingertips rested against his cheek. He blinked his eyes open slowly as if dazed, looking into hers, and he smiled until creases folded at the corners of his mouth, under her fingers. She smiled back.

Then his smile froze, and a frown twitched between his brows. His happy expression cracked and fell.

“Kylo?”

“Oh no,” he whispered.

“What? What is it?”

He pushed her away from him with his hands on her waist, keeping her at arm’s length even as he didn’t seem able to let go of her. His eyes flicked from side to side as if he was thinking quickly. “The spell.”

“What about it?” Rey couldn’t keep up. Her hands fell on top of his, wanting a connection with him even while he was acting strange.

He grunted, and flinched, his stomach tensing as if he’d been hit. “You’ve given me too much.”

“What?”

“I didn’t think. Rey, I’m so sorry-”

“What are you saying?”

“The spell is unbalanced. A family, a mate, it’s too much. You have to leave.”

“What?! But my eggs! I can’t just-”

“I’ll look after them. Please, you have to go now, the spell is taking the difference out on me.” He groaned, hunching forward for a moment then gasping when it relented. “You have to go.”

“What about my parents? Where are they?”

He groaned again. “I didn’t want to tell you like this…”

“What?”

“They’re dead, Rey. They died days after leaving you. They were never coming back. I’m so sorry.” He looked up at her from under her brows, his arms wrapped around his stomach and his tentacles writhing on the floor.

Rey flinched back as if he’d slapped her. At first she wanted to reject it, accuse him of lying, say he was wrong, but… He’d used magic. He couldn’t be wrong. “You’ve known this whole time?”

“I’m sorry, I- Rey!”

She turned and bolted for the cave entrance, swimming as fast as she could away from him, following the canyon wall up, up, up until she reached the light again. 


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Rey burst out into the light and was immediately blinded by it, even at this depth where the sun was filtered and faded. She threw up her hand to shield her eyes, blinking, trying to adjust. This would be nothing compared to the bright light in the shallows at the reef, but she was disoriented after so long in the Dark. This felt like another world, one where none of the past month had happened.

The pressure was less here, and the rhythm of the water rushing for the shore and being repelled pushed and tugged at her. She felt battered by it, and like it was too easy to breathe, making her light-headed, but she gathered herself and swam on. She knew this water well enough to swim it with her eyes closed, and she made her way back to her home, squinting and taking occasional peeks.

The hollow under the small rock shelf was swept with sand, and it looked tiny to her now. A suitable burrow for a child, and she had just never left, squeezing her body into it even as her tail hung outside. She’d been able to do that because she was alone, then and now. She curled her body into the hollow, the bottom half of her tail on the sand outside, and her slit not yet sealed from where Kylo had pulled her last egg from her.

She wondered whether it would fertilise after all, in the nest with the others, coated in Kylo’s seed. It felt unusually cruel that her eggs got to stay with him, and she didn’t. By now, he might have moved off the nest, and they could have peered at the eggs together, speculating on which ones had fertilised. Maybe they could have held hands, and kissed again. Instead she was here, alone, no eggs, no mate, no parents. Everything gone all at once.

She put her hands to her eyes and cried. Mermaid tears were rare and precious, magical, but she let the sea take them.

Would she have children she never got to meet?

No, there was no reason she had to stay up here forever. There was no reason Kylo wouldn’t still be in his cave if she went back tomorrow. It was his home, and he promised to look after the eggs. He wouldn’t move them now.

She tried to calm herself down. She could at least visit, she thought. She didn’t know how magic worked, but their spell should be over now, shouldn’t it? Now that he’d told her about her parents? The exchange was over, so they were free to do what they liked? She hoped that was how it worked.

She’d left her bag, with her knife, behind. She didn’t have any of her hunting tools. She might be hungry for a while.

Everything felt so big, and this time, she had no hope to fall back on. Her parents were dead, and they had been all along. She took a small measure of comfort from the fact that they had never meant to leave her alone for so long, that she wasn’t unwanted, they had just met with some accident. Their bones could still be out there somewhere. She was an orphan, but she’d been loved once.

She balled her hands up over her chest and hugged them to her heart, her crying turning to sobs for her parents, for the young couple killed, for being separated from them and growing up alone, for the tragedy of it. And when she was empty, she thought of Kylo. He’d always been kind to her. He was lonely too, she was certain of it, not least because her price had been to keep him company. He was trapped alone in the Dark, though she supposed he had their eggs now, so he might not be alone forever.

He felt like he was hers in a way no one else ever had, so she was determined find a way to stay with him.

She slept.

The next day, she set out for the reef. First things first, she had to eat, and she knew she could get a meal off Finn and Rose.

The reef was a massive coral sprawl running parallel to the shoreline. The water was shallow and the sunlight was blinding, enough to tan the skin. The merfolk made their homes in the coral, and bustled to and fro, crafting things to trade at the market. Overseeing it all was the largest structure, Queen Leia’s palace, where she lived with her brother, Prince Luke.

As Rey swam over the hard coral, voices called out at the sight of her.

“Rey! Where have you been?”

“Haven’t seen you in a while!”

“What have you brought us today?”

She waved at the merchants and offered them small smiles, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t want to spill the story of where she’d been to them before her friends. It bubbled up inside her with a pressure she didn’t recognise. All she knew was that she wanted to crow all over the reef that she had met a sea witch, a beautiful, kind man; that he lived in the Dark and was minding her nest of fertilised eggs that very moment.

She found Finn and Rose on the rock shelf, examining a nest that Rey guessed was theirs. The sight of the shelf and all the mermaids guarding their eggs stopped Rey for a moment, but she ploughed on. She had a nest too, with fertilised eggs in it, it was just somewhere else, and that was fine. Finn had his arm around Rose’s waist as she turned the eggs over, trying to see which had a baby inside, though it had only been a day.

When they saw Rey, they screamed in excitement, rushing over to wrap her in their arms.

“Rey, where have you been?!”

“We thought something had happened to you!”

She told them everything. At first, when she told them of going to seek out Snoke, they bemoaned her stupidity. When she told them of his apprentice, they were amazed. When she told them about the spell, Rose clapped her hand over her mouth and kept it there, but Rey told them how sweet Kylo was, how awkward and shy, how his tentacles crawled all over her body and she didn’t mind, how they shared his bed.

When Rey told them about nesting in Kylo’s cave, and kissing him, their eyes bugged wide.

“Oh, Rey…” Rose began, obviously torn. Fertilised eggs were a cause for congratulations, but Rey’s mate wasn’t a merman, at least not anymore. Rey grinned, to let Rose know what to say. “I’m so happy for you.” She hugged Rey again. Rey had never said anything about not having a mate year after year, but Rose, of course, had noticed she never built a nest with the rest of them. “But… a sea witch?”

“I know, Rose, but he’s a good man! I- I think I love him, or I could, if we had longer together, but I had to leave. The spell ran out, and it started to hurt him. He told me- He told me my parents died, not long after they left me. They were coming back, but something happened to them.” Her voice grew thick, saying it out loud, and Finn joined their hug from the other side. When she was back in control of herself again, she said “I only just got back last night. I’m going to try to see him again. I can’t just leave my eggs there, even if he and I…”

“Rey, I think you should tell Leia all of this. She’d want to know if there’s a sea witch making deals and casting spells nearby,” said Rose.

“Kylo’s not evil! He only made that deal with me to stop me from going to Snoke!”

“I know, but she is the Queen. Maybe she knows something that can help, make sure you get your eggs back if things go bad.”

“Plus, you know, there is that old legend that Snoke took her son.”

Rey nodded in sad agreement. Then they all realised the same thing at the same time, heads whipping up and eyes wide. For a moment, they just stared at each other.

“You don’t think…?” Finn began.

“He said he doesn’t remember who he used to be,” Rey told them.

“We need to find out what the prince looked like,” Rose decided.

Rey’s stomach churned at the thought of what they were suggesting. She could handle a sea witch for a mate, she wanted him that way, but a prince? Rey was not princess material. She was not ready for her children to be heirs to the throne.

They darted back to the reef, heading for the palace.

Leia was not a lofty queen. The reef was a small, peaceful kingdom for her to rule over, so she often swam out among her people unguarded. When three young merfolk suddenly barrelled towards her, she looked up in alarm, but didn’t flinch back.

Confronted with the Queen, Rey hesitated, then bowed. Beside her, Rose and Finn did the same, awkwardly, unpracticed. When she looked up again, Leia looked like she might be suppressing a laugh.

It seemed impossible that Kylo could have come from a mermaid smaller than Rey, and she lost confidence for a moment, but then Leia said, “How can I help you?” Her voice was stately as she tipped her chin up and demurely clasped her hands in front of her.

“Um-”

“Rey’s been living in the Dark for over a month with a sea witch!” Finn blurted out.

Rey shot him an appalled look.

Leia’s brows rose, and she looked over the group, but otherwise kept her composure. “That’s very dangerous.”

“It’s not- It wasn’t- He-” Rey forced herself to take a breath. “I think I need to tell you the whole story.”

“Certainly. In the palace?” Leia took their stunned silence for agreement and swam away from them, leaving them to follow.

The palace was a huge coral structure decorated with pearls, with dozens of doors and windows built into every level. She seemed to pick one at random, and Rey nervously followed her into a tunnel with many diversions, until Leia picked one filled with beds of moss and reclined, gesturing for them to do the same. A merman with a gold tail swam in with a platter of delicacies.

“Now, what did you want to tell me?”

Rey glanced at Finn and Rose, and began, explaining first why she left the reef, why she felt the need to make a deal with Snoke. When she got to the part where Kylo found her, she watched Leia’s reaction carefully as she described meeting not the sea witch, but his apprentice, a young man with pale skin and black hair.

Leia stiffened, her face draining of colour as she silently pressed her hand to her mouth, and Rey knew their suspicions were correct. Kylo was the missing prince.

“He’s alive?”

“He said he used to be a merman, but that he doesn’t remember who he used to be, because Snoke took his name, and-”

“Ben,” Leia interrupted. “His name was Ben.”

“Ben?” Rey had never heard that name before. It was exotic, not a merfolk name at all. It suited him.

Leia nodded. “His father was-” She cut herself off with a small smile, lost in a memory. “Well, human. A pirate, a smuggler, and all-around rogue. As charming as the sea is deep. He never knew about Ben, so I gave him a human name, just in case… they should ever meet one day.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” Rey agreed, then told Leia the rest, about Ben offering to make the deal with her to keep her from Snoke, about his price, and spending time with him, and how kind he was to her. Eventually she came to building her nest. Leia wouldn’t have missed that the previous day was Laying Day, Rey just confirmed what had happened for her. When she told Leia how it had all gone wrong, the queen swam over and wrapped her in a hug.

“Thank you for telling me this,” she said, her voice thick in Rey’s ear. “We’ll get them back. We’ll get them all back.”

Rey put her arms around her. “Now?”

Leia pulled back, nodding. “Let’s go now.”

She led them out of the palace, and Rey swam ahead, feeling almost pulled to the Dark where she hoped Ben, and her eggs, waited for her. At the lip of the canyon, she hesitated. “Will you let me go down first, and talk to him? I’ll bring him up.”

Leia smiled, a little sadly. “Of course. After what happened, you need to know how the magic between you was affected, and if he doesn’t remember me…”

Rey darted in to give her another hug. She might have been the queen, but she was in pain. “I’ll bring him back,” she promised, before diving down into the Dark.

She just hoped she could find the way back.

She swam all the way to the bottom, trying to retrace her path from the first time they’d met, and she soon found landmarks she recognised from their daily trips to the hunting grounds. She swam as fast as she could back to Kylo’s cave, hurrying inside.

Kylo was lying on his bed on his side, his hair obscuring his face. Three of his tentacles reached across the floor to dip into her nest, but that was the only sign he was still alive.

“Kylo?” She edged forward.

A tentacle shot out to wrap around her tail and she yelped in surprise, instantly ensnared and reeled in as he rolled over and sat up. He was pale, with dark circles under his wide eyes, his mouth open in shock as he stared at her, and a long black mark stretched from his chest to his forehead. “Rey? You came back!”

“Of course I did!” she said, smiling, holding her arms up for a buffer as she bumped off his chest, his arms catching her around the waist.

“But- The spell, your price, your parents…” Guilt twisted his face and he dropped his eyes.

She cupped his cheek to bring his face back to hers. “I wasn’t going to leave you behind,” she said. “Or our eggs. Are they okay?”

His tentacles loosened around her, gently pushing her over to the nest. “See for yourself.”

Rey looked into the nest. It was exactly as she had left it. The eggs had hardened and turned white and opaque. They would only know which ones had been fertilised when the babies grew big enough to show through as black smudges inside. The one that had got stuck inside her had red veins running like scratches on one side, and it made Rey uneasy. It didn’t look healthy. All the others did though, so she turned back to Kylo, a look of compassion replacing her grin. “What happened to your face?” she asked as gently as she could.

He lifted his hand to the mark. “Ah.” He looked almost bashful. “The magic restored the balance. It wanted my face, I suppose, as well as my name and my tail.”

Rey swam over to him. “Does it hurt?”

“No. It’s numb.”

Rey brushed it with her thumb. It was rough, and cut into him like a deep scar. “I’m so sorry.”

He settled his hands on her hips. “Don’t be. If it’s the price I pay for our family then it’s a small one.” His lips tensed for a moment. “Do you still want…?”

Rey was quick with her answer, certain. “Yes. I do. We’re going to have babies together, and if you want to be my mate, then I still want you to be too.”

He took her lips in a quick kiss. “I do, I do want that.”

Rey stiffened, remembering the magic. “Is it safe? If we’re together- I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Kylo smiled. “As long as we’re together because we both want to be, I’ll be fine.”

“Okay, good.” Rey returned his smile, taking a moment to just appreciate the moment, the happiness on his pale face with its distinct features and new black scar. “I have something to tell you. I found out who you are.”

His smile dropped, and he pulled away a little, but this time it was her turn to cling to him. “What?”

“Back at the reef, we have a story. I thought it was just a legend. I never thought it was _you_. If you want to know, there’s someone waiting at the top of the canyon for you.” She didn’t want to drop it all on him at once if he didn’t think he could handle it, if there was some reason he couldn’t ever go back. Maybe, if it was his price to Snoke, giving him his name back might hurt him, like what had happened to his face.

Kylo gulped and sank down onto his tentacles “Who?”

“…Your mother.”

“I have a mother?” He looked down, his eyes moving from side to side as he thought, then all of his tentacles bunched up suddenly as if trying to hide underneath his body. “She probably doesn’t want to see me, not like this.”

“She does, she misses you so much! She wants her son back, and she already knows about your tail. I told her everything about us, I told her how kind you’ve been to me.”

He made a small noise, like he’d been bumped in his sleep, and his fingers touched the mark on his chest. “She knows I- I’m a witch?”

“Yes, I told her you were Snoke’s apprentice, but it doesn’t scare her. She just wants to see you again.” Rey took his hands, uncurling his fingers. “She misses you,” she said again.

Kylo looked at where she held his hands. “Okay, Rey, but… Can you give me my name first?”

She smiled. “Your name is Ben.”

“Ben…” he repeated slowly, and then he gasped. “I remember! I- Where’s my mother?”

“She’s waiting for you, I’ll show you where.” She grabbed his hand and took off, but he snatched his hand back.

“Wait! The nest, we can’t leave it.”

Rey looked around the cave. “We can put something over it. We won’t be gone long.”

Ben didn’t have much that was big enough to cover the nest and protect it, that could still be moved easily. In the end, they had to use one of the kelp mattresses they had been sleeping on. They lowered it slowly, watching carefully to make sure it didn’t crush the eggs.

“Okay, now let’s go!” Rey led him out of his cave and back the way she had come, swimming up the canyon wall as quick as she could, grinning. She had her mate back, and in a few minutes, he would have himself back. She burst out into the open sea in front of Leia, Rose and Finn, triumphant. “I brought him!”

But Ben didn’t come out after her. They all turned to look, and Leia edged forward, leaning over the canyon wall to see into the dark. Rey could see Ben hiding a few feet down, his skin white in the dark, like a ghost. He looked terrified.

“Ben…?” Leia called.

A single black tentacle reached into the light, uncurling over the edge of the rock, ready to pull himself up.

Leia gasped, and it whipped away, and Ben’s white shadow disappeared back into the depths. “Ben, no!” Leia dove after him, and Rey followed. She knew how hard it was from someone from the reef to see down there, and she didn’t want the queen getting lost or hurt.

But she quickly drew to a halt, Ben had stopped, probably thinking the same thing Rey had. He hadn’t expected Leia to follow him. Rey watched as Leia approached him slowly, her hand outstretched.

“Ben, please don’t go again. I was just surprised, but I don’t care. Really, I don’t.”

“Mom…” Ben said, his voice thick. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for it to go this way. I just wanted to be like you. I wanted to strong enough for the throne, but Luke told me-”

“Shh…” Leia reached him, and pulled his head to her shoulder, wrapping her arms around him like he was still a little boy. “Never mind what Luke said. You were always exactly right for the throne, because you’re my son, and I say so.”

Ben put his arms around his mother, holding them both to the canyon wall with his tentacles. Rey watched, a lump in her throat. It was the reunion she’d wanted for herself, with her own mother, but that was impossible. She didn’t resent Ben for it though, she was glad he’d got his mother back, and Rey had found her family too, in him, and the eggs that they shared.

After a few long moments, Leia pulled back. “Rey told me you have a nest. Will you show me? I want to meet my grandbabies.”

He glanced at her then, and Rey nodded with a smile, and Kylo led them down to his cave. It was only just big enough to fit all of them.

“You lived here all this time?” she asked, as Ben lifted the mattress back off.

“Only since I left Snoke.”

Leia hovered over the nest, and Rey’s instincts flared up but she forced them down. This was the queen, and Ben’s mother.

“Oh, what happened to this one?” Leia pointed.

Rey swam forward from where she’d been hugging the wall, not wanting to intrude on Ben’s moment with her. “I-It got stuck. I don’t think it will come to anything,” she explained, as if to reassure Leia that she wasn’t putting any false hope in the egg, that she had realistic expectations, that she was sensible.

Leia just hummed. “Well, we’ll see. You two will have to stay here, of course, until they hatch. You shouldn’t move them. But after that, then I would love for you to live in the palace with me, and until then, I want visits. If you don’t come up, I’ll come down.” She said it like a threat, but it made Rey smile.

“Of course,” she promised.

“Good,” Leia said decisively, then her face softened. “I’ll leave you two here for now, I need to go and tell Luke what’s happened, not to mention get the palace ready and announce to everyone that they’ve got their prince back, but I’ll see you tomorrow, yes? Don’t be shy, Ben, just because you’ve got those instead of a tail. I’ll drag you up myself, if I have to.”

“Yes, Mom,” Ben said bashfully. “Do you need me to guide you back to the top?”

“I might be older than when you last saw me, but even I can’t get lost when I just have to swim upwards.” She gave them one last smile and let herself out.

Rey swam over to look at her eggs again. Nothing had changed, but still it eased something in her to see that they were okay.

Ben’s hand touched her back and she turned to face him. He was looking at her softly. “Rey… thank you. How can I ever repay you?”

She pressed her fingers to his lips, a bolt of fear going through her. “You’re not allowed to talk like that, remember? We do things because we want to, that’s how this is going to work.”

His hands settled on her hips and pulled her to him. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Old habits. But do you really want to stay here?”

“Ben, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

He smiled and dropped his forehead to hers gently, his eyes closing. “I like that name in your voice.”

She put her arms on his shoulders, threading her fingers through his cloud of hair. “Well, you’ll be hearing it a lot, I think.”

He closed the gap between them with a kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter left! Thanks for following along! :) You can find me on Twitter @a_o_3_t_a_d


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finished! And I fit it all into Mermay... Thank you everyone for reading along. You'll notice the rating has gone up, it is now E

Rey moved back into Ben’s cave in the Dark, but they took it in turns to visit the reef, one person staying behind to guard the nest. Rey went with Ben at first, to introduce him to everyone, and help him weather the stares and gasps that came with being a missing prince returning with tentacles. His tentacles looked almost funny in the sharp sunlight that blinded Ben. Maybe she’d never really been able to see all of them at once before, every dip and curve, or maybe it was just that, in the shallow water with sharp coral all around them, Ben found it safer to walk than to throw himself forward the way he did when he swam. He had a lot of limbs to keep track of after all.

She watched him join his mother on her daily swims around the reef, and reunite with his uncle, Prince Luke. They talked about what to do with Snoke, knocking ideas back and forth. Ben had no desire to see his old master ever again, but he knew he was the one who stood the best chance of defeating him. They knew Snoke was dangerous, but he had been quiet for a long time, and they didn’t want to provoke him into attacking the reef. Until they had a plan, they wouldn’t act. Leia had only just got her son back, she didn’t want to lose him again.

Ben begged Rey to stay with him when Leia started talking about crown jewels, and looking the part. Rey laughed at his miserable expression as he allowed mermaids to thread his hair with pearls, and roll bracelets up his tentacles, and sow his hands with rings. She laughed but… he _was_ beautiful. Regal, and, more than that… he was desirable to her in the way a mate _should_ be, the way only her mate _could_ be. With his strong, arch nose, the sharp contrast between his white skin and black hair and tentacles, and the scar on his chest and shoulder like the lash of a whip, he looked war-worn but undefeated.

He shook it all off as soon as he was back in his own cave, the jewels raining down with a soft tinkling. Then he took her in his arms and kissed her, more often than not, as if that was where he found his comfort.

They watched their eggs. Not all of them had fertilised, and Rey had been right that something was wrong with the one that had stuck inside her. It soured, turning yellow then brown, until Rey had to beg Ben to let her get rid of it before it harmed the others. He didn’t want to give up hope on it, but it was obvious to Rey there was no life inside. They had four eggs with noticeable dark smudges in them that seemed to grow bigger every day. Two more had no smudges, so she took those too to bury in the sand outside. She didn’t mind doing it. Four babies were a miracle to her, but Ben was sad, and spent the rest of the day curled around the nest, his hand inside to brush the eggs gently with his fingers.

Rey recognised his hurt as one she’d felt many times, and while she wished she could have shielded him from it, she loved him all the more for it. Most mermen didn’t care about eggs that hadn’t taken. She didn’t know anyone else who would mourn the way Ben did for simply what could have been in another life, who wanted every opportunity to come to something good. Even an empty egg deserved to be missed.

Months slipped by as they slept in his bed and hunted and played together, chasing each other around the canyon as Rey’s sight adapted further. His tentacles didn’t crowd her as much as they used to, perhaps that had been part of the spell, and now his fear that she would leave was soothed. Instead, it was her arms that found him at night, or as they ate. One night, as they kissed on his bed, Ben’s hands wandered over her body as they were wont to do. Her hands were in his hair, her favourite place for them, but Ben was less choosy, touching her everywhere. His hands slid over her sides and back and tail. He liked to touch her breasts, circling her nipples with his thumbs and squeezing gently. They would fill with milk soon, in preparation for her eggs hatching, but not yet.

Rey adored his petting. She loved to feel like he was somehow everywhere, his tentacles writhing against her tail as his hands stroked her skin. Tonight though, his hand moved from her hip to the front of her tail, his fingers searching. She thought he was just exploring the texture of her scales and paid it no mind, until his thumb rubbed softly up and down, up and down in a lulling caress that relaxed her so well, his thumb actually snagged on something.

“Oh!” she said, and breaking their kiss to cover the spot with her hand. “I’m sorry, that’s my-… I don’t know why it opened now.”

Ben kept his thumb just there, and murmured to her, “Because I asked it too.”

“What? Why?”

His cheeks pinked ever so slightly. “I thought we could…” He clearly expected her to know what he meant, and when she just blinked at him, confused, he grew awkward and shy, as if she’d rejected him. “W-We don’t have to. I just thought, if we’re mates, maybe you would… like to?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she had to admit.

Ben studied her eyes carefully, evidently judging that she was being honest. “It’s, um… I don’t always have to fertilise your eggs _outside_ your body.”

Rey made a face. He was talking nonsense. “But I don’t have any eggs. It’s not spring yet, my eggs are over there.” She rolled to point at their nest.

He caught her hand, turning her back to him. “But sometimes it’s fun to pretend?”

She stared at him. She was clearly missing something vital here. “I don’t understand.”

He blew out a breath and shifted closer, his voice low and quiet. “It feels good when I release my seed. I want to do it with you, inside you. I’m hoping it will make you feel good too.”

She tried to understand, she really did, but… “ _What?_ You want to release seed inside me? Even though I don’t have any eggs?”

“Yes.”

“ _Why?_ ”

“For the feel of it. For pleasure.”

She tried to imagine it. She tried to imagine a space in her body, under her hand, where he could fill. “Will it hurt? Will it make me sick?”

He shook his head before she’d even finished. “No, of course not, I wouldn’t want to if it would.”

Well… If it wouldn’t do her any harm and it would make him happy… “O-Okay. What do I have to do?”

He smiled and tugged her face to his again. “Nothing, just kiss me like before. I’ll open you up with my fingers.”

“That sounds very strange,” she hedged.

“Trust me, and if you want me to stop, just tell me and I will.” He kissed her again, and Rey tried to relax into it, tentatively putting his arms over his shoulders to play with his hair again, trying to focus on the kiss, on his tongue soft and slick against hers. Sometimes she wondered if his tentacle would feel the same in her mouth, but she never asked him to try it. It was just a curiosity, and he would surely think she was peculiar for asking, though after what he’d just asked to do to her, she might not worry about that again.

His hand slid back to where it had been, his thumb tracing her slit with a gentle pressure, coaxing it open, and Rey squirmed in his hold. It just felt so strange! Things were supposed to come out of there, not go in! And his thumb felt so hard and foreign. It wasn’t like when he’d reached his tentacle in there to pull out her egg. Then, his tentacle had been thinner than her finger, and soft and malleable, and her slit had already been gaping from laying her eggs. Now she could feel the ridges on the skin of his thumb moving over her inner flesh, not that different from that of the fish they ate. She wanted to tell him to be careful, but before she could, he pulled his mouth from hers and whispered in her ear, “Just relax.”

Rey took a deep breath, trying to do as he’d said. “How do you know how to do this?”

“I made the mistake of asking my mother how she managed to have me if my father was human.”

Rey’s eyes went wide. “No…”

“Apparently, and now I’d like to forget that conversation again and focus on you.” He replaced his thumb with his fingertips. “Feel that? How there’s a channel here? That’s where you’ll take me.”

Rey whimpered, she couldn’t help it, his fingers just felt so alien, even as she knew he was being gentle. “Can you use something else?”

He stilled. “Am I hurting you?”

“It just feels… rough. Hard.”

He thought for a moment, and then one thick loop of tentacle dragged up her tail as if coming awake. His fingers moved to hold her scales apart with a steady pressure from outside, and then the slick tip of his tentacle slid inside her, conforming to the tight press of her body as it pushed slowly in. “How’s that?”

Rey sighed in relief. “Better.” Somehow his tentacle just felt like it belonged, like that part of him, and that part of her, were friends. Even if it still felt strange to have something inside her, holding her open, it didn’t worry her the way his fingers had, with their callouses and nails.

His tentacle wiggled further in, increasing the stretch of his presence. “You’re so tight,” Ben grunted.

Rey huffed. It was hardly her fault! Nothing was supposed to go in there! The tip of it tickled deep inside, and she tried to lie still. His tentacle grew thicker as he packed more in with no room at the end, and the pressure was so odd, unlike anything she’d ever felt. His tentacle was so soft, it didn’t hurt or scare her at all, but it was a struggle between his determination and her natural resistance.

“Rey…” he moaned, holding her ribcage between his hands and dipping his head to lick and suck at her neck. She whimpered again. She didn’t know how her neck and her egg channel could be connected, but somehow the sensations were, one feeding off the other until she tingled all over, and her channel tightened around his tentacle, squeezing mercilessly.

His tentacle pulled out of her with an unravelling slither. “Do you want me to…?” Ben panted against her neck. She nodded. She was curious now to see what he would do, what this thing was that he wanted. She wanted to see how that would feel, if it would feel any different from his tentacle.

Ben pushed himself up onto his hands, leaning over her, and then the full mass of his tentacles crawled over her, effectively rolling her onto her back and pinning her there.

Rey had never felt anything like this before, and she looked at the black mass in shock. Was this how his prey felt? His skirt smothered her from just beneath her breasts to just above her fin, smooth and pulsing and meaty. He was surprisingly heavy. She thought if he didn’t take any of his weight, he would easily crush the bones in her tail. His flesh fell around her, blanketing against her sides, while his tentacles spread out in all directions and curled to brace him. She stared at the thick trunks of the ones in front which split considerately off to either side so as not to cover her face. She pulled her arms out from under him, and she felt him twitch away to make it easier for her. If he had tensed, he could have trapped her.

She cupped his hips with her hands. “Ben…”

“Is this okay?”

She looked up at him. His black hair drifted around his face as he looked down at her from where he sat on her. His arms shook. His mouth was open too, pink lips parted to allow his chest to work faster, harder. She realised he wanted this more than she’d ever seen him want anything. This was a physical drive for him, like hunger. His cheeks were splotched with red, and his eyes were animal, but he waited for her answer.

Strange as it was to be sat on by a sea witch, this was her mate, and she wouldn’t deny Ben, sweet Ben, anything, especially not something he wanted this much. She nodded.

His flesh rippled over her, like a giant tongue almost, feeling. He shifted, drawing himself a little this way, a little that. Something different, that wasn’t the smooth heavy blanket of him, brushed against her scales, and she looked down as if she could see through him to see what it was. It found her slit, and she understood this must be the thing he wanted to put inside her, the thing he’d had to open her up for. She was relieved. It was much smaller than his tentacle.

With her slit open the way it was, it almost fell into her, the blunt end poking her insides. Rey winced a little, but she could bear it, because the look on his face was rapturous.

Then the thing dug deeper, and Rey pulled her whole body long, trying to cope with the sensation. She couldn’t tell if it was growing, or consciously reaching the way his tentacles could, or if it lived in him that size and he was simply letting it out, but it went from a blunt, soft prod, to filling her tunnel as if it had no intention of stopping.

“Ah!” she grunted. She couldn’t help herself, but the thing did not retreat, it stayed inside of her, almost too deep, carving a space for itself. It wasn’t a pain exactly… it was utterly indescribable. Pressure. Vulnerability. Intimacy. Stinging sensitivity. Depth. Strangeness. Merciless stillness. The thing didn’t move with her, she moved around it. It nailed her down and she writhed, and it paid her no mind.

Her channel grew hot with her efforts, flesh heating and softening to cope with the invader.

Above her, Ben panted and watched, his eyes dark with intent even as the rest of his face looked almost scared, his lips slack with surprise and want. “Is it… alright?” he whispered, shifting on his hands.

Rey nodded. She could handle it. “How does it feel for you?” She wanted to know he was getting what he’d wanted out of this.

He shook his head, tongue flicking out to his lips. “Amazing. Better than… You feel so good, Rey.”

“Can I… see?”

Ben grunted, but when her fingertips peeled up the rim of his skirt, he adjusted his weight again and helped her lift it. Rey sucked in her stomach to make room and pushed her hand between them, unable to see anything with his body flush against hers, pooling all over her. Her fingers bumped the thing that was lodged inside her, and she fit her thumb and forefinger around it, squeezing. It was harder than she’d expected.

Ben groaned long and loud, his head falling back, and then he rolled himself against her, the thing driving deeper, making her gasp and hiss. The web of muscle over her clenched, holding her still as he eased back and forth, sliding half a thumb-length out of her and then back in. It aggravated the heat inside her, rubbing against it and making it flare uncomfortably. There was something… The space he vacated turned hot and liquid, like nothing she’d ever felt, but he surged back in before she could enjoy it properly.

“M-More…” she prompted him hesitantly, not sure if she would regret it.

Ben picked his head up, his eyes snapping to hers, and then he pulled back, drawing the thing almost all the way out, sucking her walls into the space he’d left, plugging out the cool water that might have rushed in in his place. The heat burned in his wake, and when he pushed back in, it tamed, softened, appeased. Rey’s breathing sped up.

“More.”

Ben groaned again at her firm demand, and then he was surging like the tide, almost flattening her as his thing pulsed in and out of her. Her fin flicked, her tail was pinned, and she moaned. She put her hands to his hips, feeling them rock, and splayed her fingers over his skirt, stroking him.

“Is it good?” he grunted. She nodded deliriously. It felt too fast, almost. She couldn’t catch her breath. And yet it wasn’t fast enough. She wanted to live in those moments of retreat and completion. She could barely move, covered as she was, but she writhed against him as best she could, twitching up after him and forcing him deeper.

She moved her hands to his wrists, smoothing them up his arms, posted like columns above her shoulders. “You are so handsome,” she murmured. It was nothing she hadn’t told him before, and just like every other time, he grew bashful. His cheeks were already stained, his lips already swollen from his teeth, but it was in his eyes. He couldn’t escape her though, not when he had nowhere else to put his weight. She let her hands drift to pet his tentacles. “Beautiful.”

“Rey,” he said on a hitch of breath.

She unknotted the nearest tentacle, drawing it through her grip as it twisted in her hands, and brought the end to her mouth. If his weird desire was turning out so well, she wanted hers. She put the tip in her mouth, resting it on her tongue, closing her lips around it. It wiggled like a worm, and she sucked, holding it still.

Ben gave a shout above her, a harsh male sound. “Rey!” He bent over her, going onto his elbows so that her breasts rubbed his chest, pushed up by his skirt. He watched his tentacle in her mouth, just the tip of one of eight, but even as he kept thrusting inside her slit, he stared at her mouth as if it was the centre of his universe, fascinated. Rey ran her tongue along the underside of the tentacle, feeling the tiny suckers flinch and close, trying to catch her. This part of him was ever so slightly briny, she noticed, when no other part of him was.

The tentacle slid out of her mouth, the tip just touching the corner of her lips.

“I love you,” Ben said before kissing her. This she knew, and she put her arms around his neck again. More tentacles came up to twine around her breasts, and she moaned. She did so enjoy that.

Tensing his skirt, he rolled them slowly, so he was on his side and his skirt wrapped around her and she was fully enveloped in him. His tentacles coiled all over her, holding her impossibly tightly, until they loosened to move her against him. Like this, she could have his arms around her as well, and his hand cupped her head, his fingers sinking into her loose hair.

“Will you come with me?” he asked, nipping at her lips.

“W-Where?” she asked, finding it hard to speak, her eyes almost rolling at the repeated thrusts of her body against his, thinking now was a strange time to invite her somewhere.

He gave a breathy chuckle. “Will you find pleasure too?”

“O-oh yes, I like this!” she said, letting her eyes drifted closed as she felt his smile spread against her cheek.

“And if I spill my seed now, and end it?”

She mewled, flattening her hands just under his shoulders. “Not yet!”

“No?”

She swallowed, and shook her head.

“You like my cock inside you too much?”

She nodded.

Another smile, against her other cheek this time. “I like it too. But you have to come, sweetheart, or I don’t know what I’ll do.”

She moaned. “Come _where_?” she asked, frustrated by this line of questioning.

“On me, around me, _here_.” He sent a tentacle between them to trace her slit, making his point.

“Oh! Leave that there!” she cried, and soon her channel seemed to go into paroxysms, beating at him and the thing inside her, while the rest of her body didn’t seem to know what to do, curling and seizing out of her control, while such a hot feeling rushed through her to the tips of her fin and the ends of her hair. She gasped, but Ben just cooed gently to her, continuing to thrust inside her, stroking her. When her body had calmed down again and relaxed, and she suddenly felt lax and exhausted, he squeezed her to him.

“My turn.” His hand slid down her back, coming to rest on the back of her tail, opposite her slit, and pushed her against him. A few more thrusts like that, and a wetness burst between them, noticeable for its slickness, thicker than water. Ben groaned, and Rey held still, not sure what to do. His eyes closed and his muscles tightened all around her, and then all of a sudden he let her go, almost dropping her if she didn’t roll onto his tentacles which jumped up to cushion her.

She looked down at herself. Her slit was still open, pink against her white scales, and her belly was coated in his thick seed. She rubbed her fingers through it, testing.

“Mmm, sorry,” he murmured, sounding like he too had been affected by the same lassitude she had. He pulled her back into his arms, rolling onto his back, his skirt down again and everything where it should be, so that they were belly to belly. “Did you like that?”

“I think so…” Rey said, trying to think back on it, but so many details evaded her memory. She felt as if she had been caught in a riptide and hurled from one place to another, and she was only just getting her bearings.

“Would you want to do it again sometime?”

“Yes.”

Ben smiled dozily, and kissed her forehead. “Good.” He kissed her nose, her lips, and then promptly fell asleep.

Rey watched him for a few seconds more, deciding she must have done this strange breeding well enough.

Eventually, the time came for her eggs to hatch. Ben seemed more nervous than she was, his tentacles spread out around the nest and hovering over the eggs, afraid to touch them. The four that had grown shadowed with the babies inside grew until the eggs stretched to their limits. The eggs twitched and rolled as the babies wrestled against their confines for more space, until the shells split.

The first born was a boy, the biggest, with a black tail and a little mop of black hair. He wriggled and blinked up at them, then settled into the bottom of the nest, happy to breathe fresh water and unfurl his tail. His belly was round with the yolk that would sustain him for a day or two, until he needed Rey’s milk.

His brother was born late that night. His tail was black and white, and he was born without hair, and he wouldn’t settle, rolling and flopping until Rey took him out of the nest, holding him delicately in her hands. Ben watched, his hands out as if primed to catch his son, while simultaneously terrified of touching him.

The next day, they had a little girl, with a tawny tail with two white patches, and her mother’s brown hair. Her eyes opened and rarely closed after that, watching everything around her without making a sound.

They had to wait two days for their last daughter to come out of her egg, and Ben fretted himself senseless. He suggested piercing the egg themselves, just to help her along, because what if she was stuck? But Rey knew better. Leia had advised her never to do such a thing. The baby squirmed against her shell, so they just had to wait. She seemed smaller than her siblings, so perhaps it would take longer. When she did emerge, tearing through the egg with elbows and hands, it became clear why she’d had more space.

She had Ben’s tentacles, pure white, and black hair.

She wrestled her way free of the deflated shell with a tiny mewl, eight little tentacles smaller than Rey’s fingers wiggling in all directions, and Rey reached down to take her daughter’s hand.

Ben went pale. “Oh no…” he groaned, dismayed, as Rey cooed down to their youngest. “My curse… Rey, I didn’t think- I thought it was _my_ price to pay-”

Rey shut him up with a sharp look. “Our daughter is not cursed, and neither are you. If she grows up to be anything like you, I’ll be proud of her, and I’m going to love her and all of them every single day.” She picked her daughter up carefully, her tentacles tangling around Rey’s wrist and latching on. She was adorable. Rey swam to Ben’s side, holding the baby out to him. She would need him as she grew, he would be the only other person like her, he couldn’t shy away from her. Ben took her slowly, her tiny body fitting into one of his hands, while he used the other to gently unlatch her tentacles and transfer them to him. “She’s yours. Not Snoke’s or anybody else’s, and she’s going to need you.”

Ben looked down at his daughter in his hand, stroking her cheek and her belly with a finger first, and then with the tip of a tentacle.

“Don’t you think she’d beautiful?” Rey prompted him.

“Of course I do…” he murmured, awed. The baby wrapped her tentacles around her father’s and gave a little squeak. Ben seemed to collect himself at that, looking around the cave at his mate and children. “At least none of them got my ears,” he said with a wry smile.

“Hey, I love your ears,” Rey protested.

He drew her into his chest. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Rey said, giving it back to him along with a kiss, in the cave in the Dark where it had all started. Soon they would move into the palace, and Rey would be glad for the help with the babies from people with experience, but just then it felt right that it was just her and Ben. She had learned love was like magic. It had to be balanced, and it changed you, and it could give you everything you ever wanted as long as it was shared.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on Twitter @a_o_3_t_a_d


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